saved you from asphyxiation. The long fur-lined working-dress, common
to all ages and sexes of Mongols, is buttoned on her left side with
bright brass buttons, and is belted in with a sash. She has not the
padded shoulder-humps, nor the spreading hair arrangement, which
gave to her mother, who welcomed us, so weird an appearance. Her
complexion is swarthy like an Indian’s, not the Chinese chalky yellow,
and she has red cheeks and full red lips. Her eyes are large and black.
The rest of the party have stayed a moment outside to ask about hay and
water. You have made this solitary and awkward entrance. The girl has
no more notion than a bird who the strange man of another nation may
be, who has stumbled into her home. But it does not trouble her in the
least. For a moment she looks you over calmly, with a smile of amused
curiosity, rolling and wringing with her fingers a lambskin which she
is softening. Then composedly she bids you the Mongol welcome, “_Sein
oh!_” and holds out her hand. Her grip is as firm and frank as a
Siberian’s.
Now Alexsimevich comes tumbling through the door, and next André. Both
are used to these huts, and artistically stoop below the smoke-line.
All our impedimenta--blankets, furs, pots, kettles, bread-bag,
rifles--are heaped in a mound within the space between the couch and
the tethered lambs. The girl has not stirred from her work.
“They are friends of yours then, Alexsimevich?” you ask.
“No, no, I never saw them,” he answers. “Any one may take shelter in
any _yurta_ in Mongolia.”
A small head suddenly makes its appearance from the pile of rugs on the
sofa opposite on the women’s side of the tent. There emerges, naked
save for a bronze square-holed Chinese _cash_ fastened around her
neck, a little slant-eyed three-year-old. The water in the small cups
offered to the _dokchits_ has long been ice, and one has full need of
one’s inner fur coat and cap in the hut, where the entrance, opening
with every visitor, sends a draft of air, forty degrees below zero,
through from the door to the open hole which serves as chimney. And
still this tot can step out naked and not even seem to feel it.
“The child’s name?” asks Alexsimevich.
“Turunga,” replies the girl.
“And your own?”
“Sibilina,” she says, and smiles.
Turunga carefully inspects you, and solemnly accepts a lump of sugar
which she knows what to do with, even if it is a rare luxury offered
to gods. She sits down, in an evidently accustomed spot on the warm
felt before the brazier, to play with the scissors-like fire-tongs,
carefully putting back the red coals that have fallen out on the
earthen platform.
The tarantass-driver, having piled up your impedimenta, excavates from
its midst the bag of rye-bread, which he sets to thaw. He gets next the
little bag of _pelmenes_, the meat-balls covered with dough-paste which
you carry frozen hard. The mother comes in from under the _yurta’s_
flap, and, placing a blackened basin over the brazier, puts into it a
little water and scours diligently with a bundle of birch-twigs. She
brushes out this water on the earthen floor near the entrance. This is
the picketed lamb’s especial territory, to which the felt rugs before
the couches and the altar do not extend. A big bag of snow which she
has brought from outside is opened and the chunks are piled into the
basin, where, while one watches, it melts down into water.
“_Boutzela! boutzela!_” she cries soon, holding a lighted sliver
over the basin to see by: “it boils.” Into the Mongol’s pot go our
_pelmenes_, to brew for a few moments. An accidentally trenchant
description of Siberian _pelmenes_ was given on the quaintly-worded
French bill of fare in the hotel at Irkutsk: “Meat hashed in bullets
of dough.” They come out, however, a combination of hot soup and
dumplings, very welcome after the long cold day’s drive across the
plains, the frozen marsh, and the rolling hills. The wooden Chinese
bowls from the bazaar at Troitzkosavsk are filled now with our
hostess’s big ladle, and the application of warmth inwardly gradually
thaws the outlying regions of the body.
But there is trouble in camp. Turunga is moved by the peculiar passions
of her sex and her age, curiosity and hunger. It does not matter in the
least that she has home-made _pelmenes_ every two or three days--she
wants these particular meat-balls. The little mouth begins to pucker
and the eyes to screw up. No amount of knee-riding by the mother takes
the place of the _pelmenes_. We fill a heaping ladleful and André
furnishes his own bowl. The mother receives it, holding out both her
hands cup-fashion as is the etiquette, and Turunga is satisfied.
The mother looks kindly to the stranger and smiles at André, then
throws more sticks of the precious firewood on the embers. André has
caught, likewise, the not unadmiring glance of the young maid. The girl
who waits in Troitzkosavsk is not the only one who appreciates our
six-foot Siberian hunter.
The dog barks in the yard, but without the menace which hailed us, and
the crunch of a horse’s hoofs sounds on the frozen ground outside. The
flap opens, with its inrush of freezing air. Stooping, there enters a
typical Mongol, squat of figure, round of head, with broad sunbrowned
face and a short queue of black hair. He wears a funnel-shaped hat,
magenta-colored, and is enveloped in a long _shuba_, with brass buttons
down one side like a fencer’s jacket. About his waist is a sash with
jingling knives and pouches. He is the head of the family, come in from
herding his horses. He turns back the long fur-lined cuffs which have
protected his gloveless hands, and stretches out both his arms for you
to place your hands over his. It is the man’s ceremony of welcome. Then
he produces a little porcelain snuff-bottle. This must be received
in the palm of the right hand with a bow. It is to be utilized, and
passed back. If the herder is out of snuff, the bottle is offered just
the same and you must appreciatively pretend to take a pinch. Such is
etiquette.
The soup is gone now; the pot, cleaned out for the tea, is again on the
boil and the leaves are thrown in. André has borrowed a hatchet from
his host, and has chopped off a piece of milk, which goes in as well.
It is in order to ask the new arrival, Subadar Jay, to pass his
wooden cup for some of the beverage. He takes it and the lumps of
sugar without a word of thanks. The Mongol language has no expression
to signify gratitude. Silence does not, however, mean that he does
not appreciate. The dozen pieces of Mongol sandal-sole bread which
he gives you later are worth two bricks of tea in open market, and
this current medium of exchange--caravan-brought tea--is worth sixty
kopecks the brick. No small gift, this bread, to an interloping
stranger who is brewing tea by his fire, and camping unasked on his
bed. A Tibet-schooled lama knows the Buddhist maxim, “Only accomplish
good deed, ask no reward.” But the unlettered Mongol layman knows its
practice.
Little Turunga has played naked before the fire long enough now; she
is caught up; her reluctant feet are put into the boots with pointed
upturned toes, and her body into a miniature sheepskin “daily,” such as
her mother and father wear. The little girl is as smiling and shy and
coquettish as any child of white skin and complex clothes.
“Will you sell Turunga for a brick of tea?”
“No, no,” says the mother, gathering the little one quickly up into
her arms, while the rest of the family smile at the offer and her
solicitude. “No, no, not even for ten bricks!”
Everybody laughs, Turunga with the rest, in a child’s instinctive
knowledge that she is the centre of admiring attraction.
Far more petting than the Russian babies get is lavished on the
little Mongols. Perhaps the much smaller families (only two or three
children to a hut) allow more attention per capita. The mother hands
Turunga over to her father,--unheard-of in Siberia,--and he plays with
the child, giving her pieces of sheep’s tail to eat from his mouth,
answering her prattle or baby-talk and endless questions. At night,
about eight o’clock, the mother takes the child to the couch and they
both go to sleep, Turunga cuddled warmly under her mother’s _shuba_.
Meanwhile we men sit cross-legged by the fire and talk of many
things,--of the pasturage for the sheep, of the snow on the road, of
the beauty of the housewife’s silver headplates, of water and roads,
of whether or not the Mongol _dokchits_ on the altar are like the Gobi
wolves that hate Chinese.
It is interesting to note how some of the words used (few, however)
have a familiar sound--although there is said to be no common ancestry
with the Indo-Germanic tongues; perhaps it is only the instinctive
sound-imitation which makes the Mongol baby cry “Mama” to its mother,
as does the child in Chita and in Chicago. “Mine,” for instance, is
_mina_; “thine” is _tenei_. A horse or mare is _mari_. The word for “it
is,” “they are,” is _beine_, a fairly respectable form of the verb “to
be” in Chaucer’s English.
The grammar is delightfully simple. In the vernacular there is no
bothering about singular or plural. “One hut” is _niger gir_; “two
huts,” _hayur gir_. “Milk” is _su_, and apparently the word for “water”
was formed from it--_ou su_. If one wants to know whether it is time
to throw in the meat-balls he says, “_Ou su boutzela?_” with a rising
inflection (“Water boils?”) and the answer is, “_Boutzela_.” The “moon”
and a “month” are _sara_, and the years go in cycles of twelve. If one
wants to compliment the host on the excellence of the sandal-shaped
bread which he hands out, loaded with gray chalky cheese (_hourut_),
one says, “Bread good be” (_Boba sein beine_); this gives him great
pleasure.
Some of the written numbers are somewhat like ours: 2 and 3 are nearly
the same, but they have fallen forward on their faces; 6 has an extra
tail. When the teapot overturns, they say “_Harlab!_” to relieve
their feelings. There is no word for “so good,” “farewell,” or “much
obliged.” These are just squeezed into the heartiness of the final
“good” (_sein_). So when one leaves, he holds out both arms, palms up,
for the host to put his own upon, and says loudly, “_Sein oh!_”
A not unbarren amusement is to study out one’s own derivations for some
much-explained words. _Tamerlane_ is often given as meaning “the lame.”
Why does it not rather come from _temur_ (iron) and mean “man of iron,”
as the ruler of the Khalka tribe was called Altan Khan, the golden
king? The Amur River has _khara-muren_ (black water) usually given as
its derivative root. Why not the Mongol word _amur_, which means simply
“quiet”?
In the hut to-night, while we are comparing mother tongues, the
brazier-fire has burned to red brands. The girl reaches into a basket
beside the door for pieces of dried camel-dung, and puts them on, that
the embers may be fed and live through the night. These _argols_ do not
smoke; she may close the chimney-hole with the flap of felt, and the
hut will be kept somewhat warm through the night. The Mongols prepare
for sleep: they take off their boots, and slip their arms from the
sleeves of their fur _shubas_, in which they roll themselves up as we
in our blankets. But how hardened they are to the cold! A naked arm
will project and the robes become loose, but they do not wake.
We keep on all our inner clothing and roll ourselves about with skins
until we are great cocoons. André gives a good-night look to his
horses; then he, too, lies down. With our heads beside the altar of the
gods, we sleep, in the Mongol’s _gir_.
How cold it is in the morning when we wake! The embers have burned to a
gray ash; the iciness of the waste outside has gripped like an octopus
the little hut, and sucked its precarious warmth through the night-long
radiation. The chimney-hole is open again, and the mother is starting
a blaze with her few pieces of birch firewood. André has gone out to
harness the horses. He has left the door flap a little wrinkled, and
the wind whirls through it and up the chimney, keen as a scimitar.
Alexsimevich is getting out the tea-bowls and the bread. You put a
reluctant hand from under the blankets and seize your fur cap. Then
you disengage the inner fur coat from its function of coverlet, and
struggle, sleepy-eyed, into it. If you have the moral courage to take
off these friends in need, and the inner coat and sweater, to get a
bowlful of snow-water, and hunt among the baggage for soap and a towel,
all at five o’clock in the morning of this freezing weather, then you
have full license to call the Mongols dirty degraded heathen. If,
however, you sit and shiver, and promise yourself that you will bathe
at Urga, it is elementary fair play to be discreetly silent about the
little failing of your hosts. You will rejoice, too, in open admiration
of courage, when you find, as you sometimes will, a clean-shaven
well-groomed lama, or a washed and combed village belle, on the road to
the sacred city.
“Ready,” says André. You finish a goodly portion of rye-bread and
several bowls of Alexsimevich’s tea, while he is carrying out the
luggage and making a pyramid of it in the tarantass. You put both
hands out to shake those of Subadar Jay, of his wife, and Sibilina. You
give a last chunk of sugar to little Turunga, and crawl out under the
tent-flap. The family calls “good-bye” from the gateway as you climb
in. Then up the hill you start, for the next day’s ride.
It is slow to travel by this schedule. One can advance by day and rest
by night, but daylight travel and night sleep, while most comfortable
for a man, are the least efficient for a horse. If progress be the
aim, one must adopt the teamster’s system. This involves a start at
midnight, and eight hours of travel at a slow trot,--six to seven
versts per hour. Then, at eight in the morning, a halt for the ponies.
One hour they stand in harness, before getting their quarter _pud_ of
hay; after which comes water, and finally, seven and one half _pfunde_
of oats. Four hours of halt are involved, in which one can roll up in
his blanket and sleep. Then off again for eight hours of trot, and
another four hours of halt at eight in the evening. So the watches go,
with some hundred versts made daily.
Noon to-day finds us climbing the hills on foot, to stretch our cramped
limbs and ease the horses, as in old times the English tourists climbed
the St. Gothard on the way to Italy. We are chilled, and racked by the
jar of the road, and glad of even strenuous freedom. Presently we get
on again, and ride down the far slope. It is the camel-boat of the
steppe, this tarantass.
A solitary gnarled tree shows in the waste of snow--the one seed
that lived, on the barren waste, of all that the Siberian winds had
brought. An eagle is watching from its upper branches. Further on are
higher hills, with trees growing on their northern declivities alone.
No foliage can stand the sun, which steals the moisture and bakes the
rocks on the southern slopes. As we pass one of these isolated groves,
the bald trees are seen to be packed with old nests; for the birds
from miles around come hither, as the only refuge for their eggs. Deer
watch us, standing ten yards off; for these Mongols are poor hunters
and their religion sanctifies life. A lama may not kill even a fly: it
might be his own father, transmigrated into this form for insufficient
piety. A big white hare starts through the trees, stops, and runs
again. Thousands of little marmots scurry to their holes in the plain
at the alarm of the tinkling bells. A kite soars with a marmot writhing
in his claws. Big gray jack-rabbits bound along the road ahead. A troop
of partridges let us pass their wallowed holes six feet away. They
peer up, their heads protruding from the snow, their yellow aprons
glistening like shields, tame as guinea-fowl. At length we drive into
Zoulzacha village.
One becomes after a time somewhat of an adept regarding quarters.
To-night the village gives a chance. The most promising exterior is
selected, and driving up, we prepare to enter. Cold and cumbersomely
muffled, you worm under the felt hut-flap, and see through the pungent
smoke of the brazier a dim figure seated to the left of a veiled altar.
Bowed over a red-beaded rosary, he is chanting in a low voice, a weird
oft-repeated phrase. He ceases as you struggle in, becomes silent, and
looks up. “_Amur sein!_” he salutes in quiet greeting, and motions you
to a place on the low sheepskin-covered couch, to the right of the
altar, opposite him.
The open smile of his welcome shows white teeth hardened by the tough
biscuit of his daily diet. You note next, with the pleasure born of
seeing anything good of its kind, the light color and unwrinkled
features of this young man of twenty-five. The gaze of his brown eyes
is direct and frank. He is clean-shaven, his hair is close-cropped,
and he has the appearance of a well-groomed horse. In contrast with
the smoke-blackened, hardship-wrinkled faces of the older Mongols, his
is as a drink from a clear mountain spring after stale drafts from a
long-carried canteen. His color is that of an athlete trained under
the suns of the running-track. His features are defined, the nose not
so flat, the eyes larger than the usual Mongol type. His expression is
earnest and sincere as he now stands up in his robe of rich orange,
trimmed and girdled with red.
He welcomes the guests without question,--it is the rule of Mongol
hospitality, but you feel for the first time what an intrusion it is
for your great Russian tarantass-driver to shoulder his ponderous way
into the home of a stranger, loaded with your bearskin rugs and rifles
and bags of bread, and to pile them loutishly on the native’s couch. At
the other huts wherein you have lodged, this sentiment has not come so
strongly. Poor places they were: the hardship-lined faces; the soiled
and ragged robes of the women, the threadbareness of the heaped-up
sheepskins on the couch, all these revealed that your two-headed eagle
of silver was needed, and your coming a windfall. But here are no sheep
fenced in, making one feel that standards are superfluous. The fuel is
put away in a basket, the bright fire-irons are ranged in a row. The
couch of polished wood is orderly, and the skin-rugs on it are folded
in their places. The little chests of drawers are brightly polished,
and the yellow cap, with its lining of fox-fur, on one of them is new
and clean.
But most of all, in the proprietor himself is there an air of freshness
and cleanliness, of youth and vigor, and of self-confidence. When you
burst into a place like this, covered with snow and muffled up in furs,
disturbing the master of the house at his prayers; when your driver
lays the uninvited mattress down in the warmest place, a man cannot
but feel like a thrice-dyed barbarian bounder, even if the home be a
fifteen-foot felt hut open at the top, and situated on the borders
of the Gobi Desert. So feeling, the first impulse is to let the host
know that you are not quite, of intent, what you are by accident,--a
big hulking foreign savage. So you hastily think over what you can
give to put yourself less at a disadvantage. The prized reserve of
milk-chocolate comes to mind. “Will the host have some?” you ask.
“_Da blagodariou!_” he answers in Russian, to your surprise.
With mixed gladness at having made good thus far in any event, and
regret at the diminished store of this commodity, you take a little
spoonful of the snuff which the host is now offering in a beautiful
porcelain bottle, patterned in flowers. Then you come back with a
cigarette. Most of these people know what cigarettes are, though some
smoke them with their noses.
“No, thanks!” and he points to his closely-cropped head.
Alexsimevich, who has followed into the hut, explains: “You speak to a
priest, he does not smoke.”
A screen hangs before the altar opposite the door. You look
hesitatingly at it. Without demur, the lama, at the visible interest,
draws back the veil. There, in painted grotesqueness, is Janesron, the
red god of Thunder, and bearer of the lightning sword. He glares down
with his three eyes upon the sunken orbits of a sheep’s head, laid
out as an offering. Black Gumbo, the six-armed good spirit, is also
there, and both are surrounded by attendant demons. All are pictured
artistically, the minute detail of Tibetan workmanship showing in
their squat bodies. The polished wood of the frames is as finely
wrought as a Japanese sword-hilt.
On the box-top, beneath the gods, are set out in neat array the best
of Mongol dainties. These are disposed in little polished brazen
cups shaped like wine-glasses. There are raisins and dried plums,
caravan-carried from the far-off Middle Kingdom, and lumps of sugar
brought down from Russia in some trader’s pack. Millet fills one cup,
water another; each symbolizing some ancient seizin. A wick, sunk in
oil, flares in the centre, and casts a flickering, uncanny light upon
the deities. Spread on a low seat, six inches above the felt rug on
the floor, are rows after rows of _boba_, the gray Mongol biscuits, in
shape like the thick soles of a sandal. As a centre-piece between the
stacked loaves rests the brown roasted sheep’s head. It is the feast
of the New Year that this unusual volume of offerings betokens. The
old year of the Horse passes with the rise of to-night’s new moon. The
leap-year--that of the Ram--will then begin. All the families in the
_eimucks_ of Mongolia will feast on the grosser part of the offering
which now lies in its ranked regularity undisturbed. For the present
the priest takes light refreshments while waiting for his midnight rite.
“Will you have some of the tea that has been brewed for you by the old
mother while you were looking at the altar?” asks Alexsimevich.
It has been made, not from the loosely-packed leaves, but from the
hard tea-bricks. A chunk of this has been cast into the great iron bowl
over the brazier when the fagot-fed fire has melted the ice and has
brought the water to a boil.
Solemnly you are presented a wooden bowl of tea, which you receive in
both hands, and as solemnly sip. The evening meal is cooked and eaten,
your sugar reciprocating the lama’s tea.
As the evening wears on, amid the smoke of cigarettes and brass-bowled
pipes, the lama brings out quaint paper slips of Buddhist prayers.
“You are interested?” He will write for you a charm. “_O mani
padmihom_,” he tells you. “The Buddhist prayer.”
“Oh, thou jewel in the lotus-flower, hail!” says the interpreter.
It is mighty, this ancient Buddhist prayer, which is murmured by so
many millions from Japan to Persia, from Malay to Siberia. It is
symbolic, esoterically, of much. The jewel is the soul, the lotus is
Buddha, the prayer, a wish that the spirit be in them which was in
_Saka-muni_, their Lord. On endless rosaries this prayer is told. It is
on the lips of priests and women, it is carved around the stones which
travelers throw upon the _obos_, the “high-places” of Old-Testament
record. It is murmured by the pilgrims as they prostrate themselves.
The disciplined body, the praying tongue, and the mind intent on sacred
things, all incline the soul to the acquirement of merit.
The lama draws now with his quick hand, trained to the Tibetan script
of the Urga monastery-school, sketches of his temple, _Zoulzacha
Soumé_, of his people’s summer tent of cloth, and winter hut of felt.
He writes out the Mongol numerals, and explains the cycles of years, in
answer to questions regarding the New-Year festival. He describes the
puzzling element-and-animal system, by which the _chére mari_, or earth
horse, is 1907, the _chére khoni_, or earth ram, is 1908, and so on
through a sixty-year epoch.
He quotes Mongol proverbs come down from old priests and rulers: “One
may buy slaves, but not brothers,” and, in the spirit of Macchiavelli,
“You can govern a State by truth as well as you can catch a hare with
an ox-cart.”
Now it is nearing moonrise. From his rolled purse the priest draws a
small slip of paper ruled into a half-inch checker pattern, in every
square of which there is a symbolic group of letters. The lama consults
this. Then he brings from the chest beneath the altar a long narrow box
in which are strips of faded paper thick as parchment. On these in red
and black are traced quaint characters, written, as is our script, from
left to right. The priest selects a dozen of his long sheets and puts
them carefully on his couch. He touches the box to his forehead and
restores it to its place. Then he turns and speaks to the interpreter.